Mingming's blog

对话图灵奖获得者John Hopcroft

The Turing Award Winner John Hopcroft will visit MSRA on Oct.24th 2012.
It is honored to attend the presentation he gave to the undergraduate interns.

The topic covered in the presentation:
- John share his personal experience
- For a senior undergraduate student, how to make right choice in the right time
- The comments for current undergraduate and graduate education
- Suggestions to students about how to develop their core skills to meet the future needs

整个对话大概持续1个小时，John先说了20min,然后就话题讨论和QA,结束之后和交大ACM班的同学圆桌，我就没法参与了。

全过程里我记了大概两页笔记，摘录精华如下：
1. 关于选择： You only one life to live , so do the job you really love doing, don't concentrate on your payment
2. 关于热爱： If you do what you love to do, you'll work 16h a day, if you don't you will only work 8 hours
3. 关于兴趣： 多选几门课，找到自己的兴趣点
4. 关于传道授业： Every Thusday afternoon, I provide free food for my students and talk about their research problems（ps:我现在的mentor这点上很像，每周请实习生吃一次饭，大家带着问题来）
5. 关于道路： If your mentor bring you to the machine learning, data mining... you are on the good way

还有对MSRA的实习生项目的优劣进行了探讨，比较了中国和美国大学的不同，并对学习给出了一些建议。

ps:
the bio of John
John Hopcroft
John Edward Hopcroft (born October 7, 1939) is an American theoretical computer scientist. His textbooks on theory of computation (also known as the Cinderella book) and data structures are regarded as standards in their fields. He is the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics in Computer Science at Cornell University.

He received his master's degree and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1962 and 1964, respectively. He worked for three years at Princeton University and since then has been based at Cornell University.

In addition to his research work, he is well known for his books on algorithms and formal languages coauthored with Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho, regarded as classic texts in the field.

He received the Turing Award – the most prestigious award in 1986. The citation states that he received the award "for fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures." Along with his work with Tarjan on planar graphs he is also known for the Hopcroft–Karp algorithm for finding matchings in bipartite graphs. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2005 he received the Harry H. Goode Memorial Award "for fundamental contributions to the study of algorithms and their applications in information processing." In 2008 he received the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award "for his vision of and impact on computer science, including co-authoring field-defining texts on theory and algorithms, which continue to influence students 40 years later, advising PhD students who themselves are now contributing greatly to computer science, and providing influential leadership in computer science research and education at the national and international level."

In 1992 John Hopcroft was nominated to the National Science Board by George H.W. Bush.
In 2009, he received an honorary doctorate from Saint Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics.

Hopcroft is also the co-recipient (with Jeffrey Ullman) of the 2010 IEEE John von Neumann Medal, “For laying the foundations for the fields of automata and language theory and many seminal contributions to theoretical computer science.”